Preparing Your System to Work with Effects

Many of the settings in Media Composer can be adjusted to optimize your work-flow when working with effects. In this section, you’ll look at some of the things you can do to make your life easier.

Disabling Auto-Monitoring

When building effects, you usually work with more than one video track. That means you will be patching tracks to edit clips on different video tracks. You can configure how the patching works with the Timeline settings, which you can access by right-clicking anywhere in the Timeline and choosing Timeline Settings from the menu that appears or by clicking the Settings tab in your project window and choosing Timeline.

In previous versions of Media Composer, the Timeline setting for auto-monitoring was always on, which meant that when you patched a track, the monitor would follow the patch. For example, the monitor on V2 in Figure 1.25 would snap to V1. This was because older systems often took too long to refresh the video display on multiple track composites. With today’s systems, however, the refresh is virtually instantaneous, making this feature annoying. In version 6 of Media Composer, it is off by default, but if you are on an older system, you can turn it off via to the Timeline Settings dialog box’s Edit tab, as shown in Figure 1.26. When this feature is off, the monitor stays where it is until you assign it to a different track. (Generally, you will be monitoring the top-most video track to see the result of all your track effects.)